Lo scioglimento delle coppie... a partire dalle coppie

In this paper we perform a study of the determinants of dissolution of Italian marriages from a gender perspective. We propose a simple survival analysis but the novelty in our approach lies in the fact that we construct our data set by creating virtual statistical units, namely couples artificially created via a statistical matching techinque. This approach allows to use information arising from two independent sample surveys, related to the “Fecondità e Famiglia in Italia” survey held in Italy in 1995/96. These two sources provide a very detailed information about men and women, respectively, included some variables related to their partners. We combine this information with that arising from a specific survey of real couples, which could not be directly used for a survival analysis since all of them were actually surviving at the time of the survey. The goal of the paper is twofold; on one side we aim at performing a statistical analysis otherwise impossible without an additional ad hoc survey; on the other hand we aim at exploring to what extent the statistical matching techniques can be used in demography.